In 1991, most Americans had not yet heard of the internet. But all of France was online, buying, selling, gaming, and chatting, thanks to a ubiquitous little box that connected to the telephone. It was called Minitel.

Minitel was a computer terminal. It housed a screen, a keyboard, and a modem—but not a microprocessor. Instead of computing on its own, Minitel connected to remote services via uplink, like a 1960s mainframe or a modern Google Chromebook. Terminals were given out, for free, to every French telephone subscriber by the state (which also ran the phone company).

Minitel was a huge success. With free terminals at home or work, people in France could connect to more than 25,000 online services long before the world wide web had even been invented. Many services of the dotcom-and-app eras had precursors in 1980s France. With a Minitel, one could read the news, engage in multi-player interactive gaming, grocery shop for same-day delivery, submit natural language requests like “reserve theater tickets in Paris,” purchase said tickets using a credit card, remotely control thermostats and other home appliances, manage a bank account, chat, and date.

Unlike AOL or Facebook, the French state made Minitel an open and neutral platform.

Minitel was decommissioned in 2012 after 30 years of distinguished service. The terminals still functioned, but they could not handle advances in graphics technology, their modems were outdated, and the French had long since moved on to the internet.

But Minitel’s lessons live on, and with new relevance. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order made network neutrality law in 2015. But this year, it has come under attack by both cable internet operators and the current FCC chairman. The American implementation of a network derived from Minitel was done by private industry alone. It failed in part because its usage was not regulated by the government. For this reason, it offers a view from the past on why the FCC’s move today might be misguided. It turns out that regulated networks might offer better market opportunities.

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In Silicon Valley, Minitel is often derided as a “backwards system,” the epitome of state centralization and bureaucracy. As the enemy of creative agility. But Minitel was the only online service to reach mass-market penetration to reach mass-market penetration before the late 1990s. Similar systems in the U.S., such as The Source, DowJones, Compuserve, and AOL, were only accessible to the wealthy, geeky few. These American systems were also centralized networks, gated communities where all content was curated by the service provider. They were the computer versions of a cable-television bundle.

By contrast, Minitel didn’t operate as a closed network. Unlike AOL or Facebook, the French state made Minitel an open and neutral platform, which allowed users to connect to privately run services. The state telecom built and operated the underlying infrastructure for the network, and it then allowed anyone to provide services atop it, so long as they registered to do so. Minitel merged state intervention (build and maintain the marketplace) with market-neutrality (anyone can sell legal products and services). That combination catalyzed the boom of Minitel services.

In 1991, France Telecom tried to reproduce their domestic Minitel success in the U.S. through a San Francisco-based venture called 101 Online. It seemed like a match made in heaven. What was then the world’s most successful public computer network was set to meet the world’s hippest tech crowd. For an extra cool factor, France Telecom hired John Coate, the guy who had turned San Francisco’s online bulletin board system, The WELL, into the world’s most influential online community at the time.

As community manager, Coate distributed the little Minitel box to technology and culture leaders such as Alan Lundell of Byte magazine and Mondo 2000. He also took terminals to rave parties such as Oakland’s 1992 Woopy Ball, where hip crowds chatted in digital chill rooms, all in an effort to build a new digital community. The ravers loved it.

But curiosity alone wasn’t enough to spur American adoption of Minitel. It needed a community with intrinsic value. And communities arise when people can meet and exchange goods, services, and ideas freely.

Consider a farmers market. If a city builds and runs one, it must let all types of legal goods to be sold there for the infrastructure to provide maximum value. If citizens can only buy tomatoes and oranges, but not kale nor lettuce, then the value of the market is limited. The same is true of computer networks: If an internet service provider does not let content providers freely access the infrastructure that the user has rented (through a cable or cellphone subscription), the value of the internet as a whole becomes depleted. That’s why the American Minitel failed—and why people should be concerned about ISPs being able to restrict the traffic on broadband and wireless networks.

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On paper, 101 Online understood the distinction between an open, online platform and a cable TV bundle. In a press release, it outlined its mission: to provide Bay Area residents “with a powerful and efficient new way to communicate with each other.” The 101 Online forum, their rebranding of the Minitel network, was said to be “an electronic ‘meeting place’… the first widely available and cheap electronic medium that allows society to talk directly with itself without TV, radio and newspapers acting as a go-between.”

But in practice, 101 Online acted as a go-between for online content. Instead of letting content providers manage their own services, as France Telecom had done, it replicated the dominant model for U.S. online networks of the era: curating all the content itself. Individuals and companies couldn’t plug into the network and sell their content, goods, and services like their French counterparts had done, and as dotcom startups would soon do on the web. Instead, they had to travel to 101 Online’s office in downtown San Francisco, hand a floppy to an operator, and wait for its content to be converted to 101 Online’s proprietary format and uploaded to the company’s server.

As 101’s head of marketing would later admit, “we did not create an ecosystem enabling anyone but us to make money.” It wasn’t anything new for online systems available to Americans at the time. In a 1983, for example, the online version of the World Book Encyclopedia was removed from the CompuServe online platform and replaced with the Grolier electronic encyclopedia—probably the result of some behind-the-scenes licensing deal. The same year, The Source announced a new policy for curating the content on its platform: “new products are receiving close scrutiny based on likely long-term usage rates, as opposed to ‘attention getter qualities.’” It shouldn't come as a surprise that The Source chose to act as a curator, since it was the online arm of Reader’s Digest, itself a master curator. No more than it should startle anyone that AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon—all network providers who also own content companies—might want to do the same with the internet.

Unbridled reliance on the private sector can restrict innovation.

What might surprise a proponent of private enterprise over state-run services, however, is that it was private-sector operators who curtailed these early online platforms—whereas in Minitel’s case, the state had remained agnostic. 101 Online used exactly the same technology that the French had implemented across the Atlantic. But when the private sector was fully in charge of administering the platform, it chose to limit rather than facilitate the marketplace.

By contrast, when an operator treats its infrastructure as neutral, as Minitel had done, its marketplace invites a greater diversity of content and services. That diversity creates more value for users and businesses alike. In Minitel’s case, openness and neutrality were guaranteed by the state, an agent bound by a duty to act in the public interest.

Today, cable internet lobbies have claimed that further regulation of internet services inevitably leads to an internet doomsday that will “increase consumer costs, slow investment and innovation and cause years of uncertainty.” Senator Ted Cruz has even called net neutrality “Obamacare for the internet,” urging against online services that “operate at the speed of government.”

But Minitel offers an unusual historical endorsement for state intervention in commercial computer networks. Government involvement can benefit both public and private enterprise, whereas unbridled reliance on the private sector can restrict innovation, as it did for 101 Online.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

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The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

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There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”